He began his political career as an outright segregationist.
When Carter returned to Plains, Georgia, to become a peanut
farmer after serving in the Navy, he became a member of the Sumter
County School Board, which did not implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision handed down by the Supreme Court. Instead, the board continued
to segregate school children on the streets of Carter’s hometown.
As Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU’s Voting Project, relates in his book A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia,
Carter’s board tried to stop the construction of a new “Elementary
Negro School” in 1956. Local white citizens had complained that the
school would be “too close” to a white school. As a result, “the
children, both colored and white, would have to travel the same streets
and roads in order to reach their respective schools.” The prospect of
black and white children commingling on the streets on their way to
school was apparently so horrible to Carter that he requested that the
state school board stop construction of the black school until a new
site could be found. The state board turned down Carter’s request
because of “the staggering cost.” Carter and the rest of the Sumter
County School Board then reassured parents at a meeting on October 5,
1956, that the board “would do everything in its power to minimize
simultaneous traffic between white and colored students in route to and
from school.”
(via Instapundit, who notes that now Carter is simply an anti-Semite.)
